Debt Collectors Game the System

By Rachael King

One collections agency is trying to better motivate customer service reps by using a gamification service. The service lets employees of Allied International Credit, a unit of Allied Global Holdings Inc., earn points and prizes for routine job tasks. Over the long term, the company says it hopes to decrease turnover and increase engagement.

Low employee engagement is a pervasive problem in the workforce. About 70% of workers are disengaged in their jobs, according to a June 2013 Gallup Inc. report. Over the last several years, engagement in customer-facing jobs has decreased to 29% in 2012 from 32% in 2009, likely due to the recession and its aftermath, according to Gallup. Allied International Credit, which does both account receivable work and debt collections, is one of many companies that are experimenting with the integration of game mechanics or game design into job tasks to help motivate workers. While gamification software and services are used in call centers to motivate customer service reps, this is one of the first examples of use by debt collectors, said Brian Burke, research vice president at Gartner Inc.

About 100 agents at Allied International Credit based in Newmarket, Ontario, now have dashboards from Bunchball Inc. on their computer screens. Employees first saw the dashboards about six weeks ago. As they work, they accrue points and badges and they can see where they stand relative to other call center workers. Sometimes, the feedback is just a fun badge when they call a new city for the first time. There is a maximum of 5,000 points that can be earned each day and a number of different prizes, said Joel MacCharles, vice president of social media at Allied International Credit. On Tuesday, Mr. MacCharles gave winners four $5 coffee cards. Other times, employees compete for a half day off on the Friday before a holiday weekend, dinner with the CEO or golf with an executive vice president.

Bunchball, based in Redwood City, Calif., sells a cloud service called Nitro to companies that want to increase engagement with employees, customers and partners. Customers include Ford Motor Company of Canada and T-Mobile USA.

The company hopes that gamification can help make the job more interesting for more experienced employees and that it can help motivate agents to do a job that can be tough. There is high turnover in the collections business because of the negative feedback that collections reps receive when they call on past due accounts, said Mr. MacCharles. “It’s very difficult to keep people beyond six months,” he said. If the company can get employees past the six-month mark, they often stay two years or longer, he said.

Still, there’s no guarantee of success. Gamification is still a fairly new industry and while more companies have begun to try services over the last couple years, there are not a lot of reported success stories, said Gartner’s Mr. Burke.

T-Mobile US Inc. said that 38,000 employees now use a cloud-based gamification service from Bunchball in connection with Jive Software, a cloud-based collaboration service for internal use. Front line customer reps use Jive to find information about products, services, pricing, policies and troubleshooting. T-Mobile had been using Jive for three years but wanted to encourage more employees to access it. In May, after T-Mobile gamified Jive, employee participation increased 81%, Krissy Espindola, director of knowledge management and social customer support at T-Mobile told CIO Journal. T-Mobile employees earn points and badges by taking a self-guided training on Jive, by searching the site for answers to customer questions and by answering colleague questions posted to Jive.

Allied International Credit is just getting started but the company says it has seen some early signs of success. One agent stayed until 9:00 p.m. one evening, four hours past his quitting time, just so he could get to first place, said Mr. MacCharles. By September, 900 agents will be up and running with the software, he said.